p. cm.
Summary: Lena looks forward to receiving the government-mandated cure that prevents the delirium of love and leads to a safe, predictable, and happy life, until ninety-five days before her eighteenth birthday and her treatment, when she falls in love.
EPub Edition ? JULY 2011 ISBN: 9780062114037
Version 02282014
ISBN 978-0-06-211243-9
[1. Love—Fiction. 2. Government, Resistance to—Fiction. 3. Family life—Maine—Fiction. 4. Orphans—Fiction. 5. Maine —Fiction. 6. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.O475Del 2011
[Fic]—dc22
2010017839
CIP
AC
* * *
11 12 13 14 15 LP/BV 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Special Edition August 2011
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Copyright
Chapter One
When I was a little kid, my favorite thing about winter was sledding. Every time it snowed, I would convince Lena to meet me at the bottom of Coronet Hill, just west of Back Cove, and together we would trek through soft mounds of new powder, our breath coming in clouds, our plastic sleds sliding soundlessly behind us while hanging icicles refracted the sunlight and turned the world new and dazzling.
From the top of the hill, we could see all the way past the smudgy line of low brick buildings huddled together by the wharves and across the bay to the white-capped islands just off the coast—Little Diamond Island; Peaks Island, with its stiff-necked guard tower—past the massive patrol boats that trudged through the sleet-gray water on their way to other ports; all the way to open ocean, distant flashes of it winking and dancing close to the horizon.
“Today I’m going to go to China!” I’d trumpet out into the quiet.
And Lena would go as pale as the snow clinging to her faded jacket and say, “Shhh, Hana. Someone will hear you.” We weren’t supposed to talk about other countries, or even know their names. All these distant, diseased places were as good as lost to history—they had imploded, turned chaotic and riotous, ruined by amor deliria nervosa.
I had a secret map, though, which I kept underneath my mattress; it had been stuffed in with a few books I had inherited from my grandfather when he died. The regulators had gone through his possessions to make sure there was nothing forbidden among them, but they must have missed it: folded up and wedged inside a thick nursery-school primer, a beginner’s guide to The Book of Shhh, was a map that must have been circulated in the time Before. It showed no border wall around the United States, and it featured other countries too: more countries than I had ever imagined, a vast world of damaged, broken places.
“China!” I would say, just to bug her, and to show her I wasn’t afraid of being overheard, by the regulators or patrols or anyone else. Besides, we were all alone. We were always all alone at Coronet Hill. It was very steep, and situated close to the border and to Killians’ House, which was supposedly haunted by the ghosts of a diseased couple who had been condemned to death for resistance during the blitz. There were other, more popular sledding spots all over Portland. “Or maybe France. I hear France is lovely at this time of year.”
“Hana.”
“I’m just kidding, Lena,” I would say. “I’d never go anywhere without you.” And then I’d flop down onto my sled and push off, just like that, feeling a fine spray of snow on my face as I gathered speed, feeling the frigid bite of the rushing air, watching the trees turn to dark blurs on either side of me. Behind me, I could hear Lena shouting, but her voice was whipped away by the thundering of the wind and the whistling of the sled across the snow and the loose, breathless laughter that pushed itself out of my chest. Faster, faster, faster, heart pounding and throat raw, terrified and exhilarated: a sheet of white, an endless surf of snow rising up to meet me as the hill began to bottom out . . .
Each time I made a wish: that I could take off into the air. I would be thrown from my sled and disappear into that bright, dazzling, blank tide, a crest of snow that would reach up and suction me into another world.
But each time, instead, the sled would begin to slow. It would come bumping and crunching to a halt, and I would stand up, shaking the ice from my mittens and from the collar of my jacket, and turn around to watch Lena take her turn—slower, more cautiously, letting her feet drag behind her to slow her momentum.
Strangely enough, this is what I dream about now, the summer before my cure, during the last summer that will ever be truly mine to enjoy. I dream about sledding. That’s what it’s like to barrel forward toward September, to speed toward the day when I will no longer be troubled by amor deliria nervosa.
It is like being on a sled in the middle of a cutting wind. I am breathless and terrified; I will soon be engulfed by whiteness and suctioned into another world.
Good-bye, Hana.